In "Gestures: A Body of Work," first published this year, editors Alice Butler, Nell Osborne, and Hilary White compile a series of essays which explore embodied, affective, and political gesture in feminist art and writing. In her own contribution to the collection, Butler delves into the ways Woodman uses textiles in her photographs and their relationship to bodies and touch.

Betty Woodman and George Woodman are often celebrated for their exuberant use of color, while Francesca Woodman is best known for her dramatic black-and-white photographs, filled with shades of grey. Working across different mediums and methods, the Woodman artists used white—and the absence of color—to fascinating effects.

Neoclassical beauty, particularly as depicted through sculptures of embracing lovers, is a recurring theme in George Woodman’s photographs—especially the myth of Psyche and Cupid’s divine love.

The Woodman Family Foundation Housing Stability Grant for Artists (WFF HSG) is now open for applications

In the spring of 1981, Betty Woodman and Cynthia Carlson started planning for “An Interior Exchanged,” an environmental collaboration presented in ARTISANSPACE at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1982.

On a trip to South Korea in 2001, Betty Woodman was introduced to the Joseon Dynasty folk art (minhwa)—with motifs like vibrant scenes of peonies and lotuses. With these paintings in mind, she started a new series of wall-based works titled “Ceramic Pictures of Korean Paintings,” which she first showed at the Daum Museum in 2002 as a five-panel mural.

Thrilled to announce our partnership with NYFA on the inaugural WOODMAN FAMILY FOUNDATION HOUSING STABILITY GRANT for ARTISTS (WFF HSG). In recognition of the increasing unaffordability of rental housing in New York City and the housing insecurity it creates for artists, we will award grants of $30,000—distributed over three years—to five visual artists with the goal of improving their housing stability.

We are very pleased to announce the acquisition of a group of important works by Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman, and George Woodman from the Foundation’s holdings by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Archives Intern Shauna Fitzgerald shares some thoughts on her experience in the WFF Archives in the Fall of 2024.

The Woodman Family Foundation archive was delighted to host students from the Art Documentation class in the Pratt School of Information’s MSLIS program on November 18. Professor Cristina Pattuelli, consulting archivist Sewon Kang, and the students joined us to survey of some of the archives highlights and have an engaging discussion on the unique opportunities and challenges the Woodman Family archives have.

In 1972, Francesca Woodman received her first camera, a 6x6 twin-lens reflex Yashica Mat-124G, from her father, George Woodman.

Betty Woodman's eclecticism reflects a wide array of influences, including those from modernist French painters like Gauguin, Bonnard, and Matisse. Yet Woodman’s connection to Matisse transcends their shared use of vivid, exuberant colors. Both artists indulged in decorative impulses through their inventive use of positive and negative space.